Pixel Qi screen hits DIY customers, gets netbook video demo

With Pixel-Qi‘s DIY 3qi display kit showing up in the Maker Shed store last week – and then promptly selling out – we’ve been waiting to see what the results are like “in the wild”. Jesse Vincent seems to be among the first to receive his multi-mode panel, and he promptly slapped it into a Samsung N135 netbook and shot a video demo (which you can see after the cut).

If you’ve been under the proverbial rock for the past few months, Pixel Qi’s screen goes from working as a regular LCD indoors to an e-ink style epaper display outdoors. Jesse says the indoor performance is just like “a normal laptop display” while taken outside “it’s almost as bright as a Kindle screen.”

Video plays back as you’d expect, even in the outdoor mode, though of course you lose the color vibrancy. What we’re now hoping to hear is what sort of battery life the Pixel Qi display allows netbooks to achieve.